A Bit on the Side (17 page)

They knew one another well, had gone together to school, picked up on the pier every morning by the bus, the only two from the village at that time. Concerned about the adventure that was being embarked upon, Fina’s father had protested more than once that they were still no more than the children they’d been then. ‘Oh, John Michael’ll fall on his feet,’ her mother predicted, fond of John Michael, optimistic on his behalf. ‘But isn’t he welcome to move in with us all the same?’ Fina’s father had offered when John Michael’s mother died, and Fina passed that on, knowing that John Michael wouldn’t ever consider serving in the half-and-half, drawing pints or checking the shelves for which grocery items were running out.

‘Sure, we have to go,’ was all John Michael said himself. Fina’s own two brothers had gone, one to Dublin, the other to England. One or other of them would have had the inheritance of the half-and-half but both had turned their backs on it.

A few evenings before they were to be parted, they walked through the twilight on the strand, talking about what they intended to reject for ever: the sea and the fishing, or John Michael being beholden in the half-and-half, his uncle’s farm. Eleven miles away, beyond the town of Kinard – which had a minimarket, a draper’s, five public houses, a hardware, and Power’s Medical Hall – the farmhouse was remote, built without foundations according to John Michael. Slated and whitewashed, it was solitary where it stood except for the yard sheds, its four fields stretching out behind it, as far as the boglands that began with the slope of the mountain. The mountain had no name, John Michael said, or if it had it was forgotten now, and there wasn’t a gate that swung. Old bedsteads blocked the holes in the hedges, there was a taste of turf on the water you drank. Damp brought on mildew in the rooms.

‘Even if you could get the place up on its feet again,’ John Michael said, ‘it’s never what we want.’

‘No way.’ Vehemently Fina shook her head, reassurance and agreement bright in her eyes. ‘No way,’ she said again.

Physically, there was a similarity about them, both of them slightly made, John Michael hardly a head taller. Both were dark-haired, with a modesty in their features, as there was in their manner. They seemed more vulnerable when they were together than when they were on their own.

‘Did you ever think it, though, Fina? That we’d be on our way?’

Her hand was warm in his, and his felt strong, although she knew it wasn’t particularly. Since they were children they had belonged to one another. On this same strand two years ago, in the twilight of an evening also, they had first spoken of love.

‘I only wish I’d be going with you,’ she said now.

‘Ah sure, it’s not long.’

*

He was gone, quite suddenly. For two hundred and one days they would be parted: already Fina had counted them. She thought at first that maybe at the last moment he’d be sent back, that the immigration-control men at Shannon wouldn’t let him on to the plane because he didn’t possess a work permit. But he’d said he’d be ready for that and he must have been. You had to be up to the tricks, he’d said.

The first day without him passed and when it was the evening of the next one Bat Quinn was talking about big bucks again, his small eyes squinting at Fina from the red fat of his face. Only Jamesie O’Connor was ever sent back, he said, on account of his dead leg. ‘Don’t worry, girl,’ Bat Quinn consoled, and began about the schooner that was pitched up on the rocks when he was five years old, twelve foreign men taken in for burial. ‘Sure, what’s here for John Michael only the like of that? And isn’t he safe with the mighty dollar to watch over him?’ Bat Quinn had more talk in him than anyone who ever came into the half-and-half. If exile or shipwrecks weren’t his subject it would be the Corpus Christi he had walked to in his childhood, twenty-three miles to Kinard, twenty-three miles back again, or how an old priest used to bless the hurley sticks of the team he favoured, or the firing of Lisreagh House. Bat Quinn had been a fisherman himself, going out with the boats for more than fifty years. He’d never worn a collar or tie in his life, he shaved himself once a week and had never had the need of a wife; he washed his clothes when they required it. All that Bat Quinn would tell you, having told you most of it before. He had stayed at home when the others went, but even so he insisted that Boston’s long, straight streets were a wonder when the evening sun shone down them. You’d go into McDaid’s and there was shamrock in pots and a photo of Christy Ring. He had it as a fact that Donoghue got to be a candy king before he went to his grave in a green-upholstered coffin. Artie Hiney made his stack in the wheatfields of Kansas. Big Reilly rose high in the Frisco police force and ran it in the end.

I missed you the minute I left,
John Michael wrote. There was a lot to tell her, his first letter went on, but even so it was short. He wasn’t used to writing letters, he’d said before he went away, he’d do his best. J
have work with a gang,
he wrote when three weeks had gone by, and unable to help herself Fina thought of gangsters. She laughed, as though John Michael were there to laugh with her.

There were tourists here last week
, she wrote herself.
Italian people who asked Mary Doleen would there be fish today. They came into the shop and we thought they were German but they said Italian. They’d be back for fish in the morning, they said, but they never came. Bat Quinn was on the pier waiting, wanting to know was it Rome they were from. There were never Italians here before, he said, the time of the wreck it was Spaniards washed up. He was down on the pier the next few mornings, but they never came back.

John Michael replied directly to that, saying he was working with an Italian but he didn’t know his name. It was labouring work, he said. ‘Give him time, girl,’ Bat Quinn advised, but when more weeks went by there was no mention of the streets of Boston or the Kansas wheatlands. Then a letter came that asked Fina not to write because there wouldn’t be an address to write to for a while. John Michael said he’d let her know when he had one again.

In this way Fina and John Michael began to lose touch. You had to lodge where you could, John Michael had explained; you wouldn’t earn a penny if you paid regular rent. Fina didn’t entirely understand this. She couldn’t see that you could lodge anywhere without paying rent, and it was too late now to ask. John Michael had to take what he could get, she of course could see that. He had to move about if it was the only way; if he said so it must be right.

A cold, sunny November began, but the pattern of the days themselves didn’t change much. Fina served in the shop, slicing rashers on the machine, adding up bills, unpacking the items that were delivered – the jams and meat pastes and tinned goods, the porridge meal and dried goods, the baking ingredients in their bulky cartons. O’Brien’s bread van brought the bread from Kinard on Tuesdays and Fridays, milk came on alternate days and there was the longlife if it was held up, which sometimes it was. Experience had taught the family of the half-and-half the business, what to order and when, what to keep in stock both in the shop and in the bar. You could be caught out if you didn’t know what you were doing, Fina’s mother used to say; you could have stuff on the shelves for a generation or find yourself running out because you hadn’t looked ahead. Her mother ran the shop and took a rest in the evenings when the men came into the bar and Fina’s father was in charge. Her mother was as lightly made as Fina was, small and busy, with a certain knowledge of where everything was on the crowded shelves of the grocery, quick with figures, spectacles suspended on a chain. Fina’s father – assisted in the bar by Fina, as her mother was in the shop – was a big man, slow of movement and thought, silver-haired, always in his shirtsleeves, the sleeves themselves rolled up. He put on a black suit to go to Mass, and a tie with a tiepin, and wore a hat for the walk through the village. Fina’s mother dressed herself carefully also, in a coat and hat that were not otherwise worn. The three of them went together on Sundays and separately at other times, to confession or confraternity.

John Michael didn’t write when he had no address, and Fina fell back on her imagination. The world of America, which she and John Michael had talked about and wondered about for so long, was spiced with the yarns of Bat Quinn, his exaggeration and fantasy steadied by facts remembered from the days when Mr Horan unrolled the map of the continent and hung it on the blackboard. On the glossy surface the states were shown in shades of brown and green and yellow, the Great Lakes blue. Iron came from Minnesota and Michigan and Pennsylvania, uranium from Colorado. Cotton and tobacco belonged to the south.

The tip of Mr Horan’s cane moved in a straight line, horizontally, up and down, dividing Nebraska from South Dakota, Oregon from Idaho. It rapped the dates of admission to the Union, it traced the course of the long Mississippi, it touched the Rockies. You listened because you had to, stifling yawns of tedium, thankfully forgetting what the Louisiana Purchase was. The scissor-tailed flycatcher was the state bird of Oklahoma, the peony was the flower of Indiana. It was in Milwaukee that Donoghue became a candy king.

The tattered schoolroom cane picking out the facts had failed to create much of a reality. Bat Quinn’s second-hand information didn’t inspire Fina as it did John Michael. But America lived for both of them on the screen high up above the bar of the half-and-half or the one in John Michael’s kitchen. For two years before she died his mother had to be helped to go to bed and as often as she could Fina assisted. Afterwards she sat with John Michael in the kitchen, with tea and pink Mikado biscuits and the sound turned low. They watched America, they heard its voices. Its ballgame heroes battled, rigid in their padding and their helmets. Steam swirled above the night-time gratings of its city streets. Legs wide, eyes dead, its gangsters splayed their fingers on precinct walls.

Fina liked it when the doormen greeted the yellow cabs, and the quick talk in the skyscraper lifts, and Christmas in the stores. She liked the lone driver on the highway, music on his radio, the wayside gas station he drew up at, its attendant swatting flies. She liked the boy who drilled for oil too near the old-time ranch, everything changing because the gush of oil was what mattered now, the boy in the end a bigtime millionaire. College days, Thanksgiving, Robert E. Lee: she liked all that. ‘You want to?’ John Michael would whisper and Fina always nodded, never hesitating.

I got work in a laundry
, the next letter said, slow in coming. Bat Quinn wagged his head in admiration when he heard. There were big bucks in the laundry business, no doubt about it. The President’s shirts would have to go to a laundry, and Bat Quinn twisted round on his barstool, exclaiming loudly that John Michael Gallagher was in charge of the shirts of the President of the United States. ‘I’ll tell you a thing, girl, you hit it lucky with John Michael Gallagher.’

Fina put all that in a letter, making a joke of it, as they would have in the past. It was a long letter, with bits of news saved up from the period when they’d been out of touch: O’Brien’s bread van breaking down, the boats unable to go out for four days, the widow dancing at Martin Shaul’s wake. She wondered if John Michael had an accent now, like Bat Quinn said Matt Cready acquired.

A Christmas card came in January and a fortnight later a letter with an address, 2a Beaver Street, a room that was big enough for both of them.
I painted it out
, John Michael wrote.
I cleaned the windows.
Ninety-one days had passed and the ones that were passing now had begun to lengthen. In Kinard a week ago Fina had chosen the material for her dress. She kept telling herself it wouldn’t be all that long before the first banns were called.

The morning the letter about the room came there was an iciness in the air when she walked on the strand, thinking about the banns and thinking about Beaver Street. She imagined a fire escape zig-zagging on an outside wall, a big metal structure she had seen in a film, windows opening on to it. She imagined a poor neighbourhood because that was what John Michael could afford, spindly trees struggling to grow along a sidewalk. She wouldn’t object to a poor neighbourhood, she knew he’d done his best.

The strand was empty that morning. The fishing boats were still out, there had been no one on the pier when she went by it. New shells were embedded in the clean, damp sand where she walked, washed by the waves that lapped softly over them. Once upon a time, so the story was told in the village, a woman had walked all the way to Galway, going after the man she loved. Missing John Michael more than ever, even though the time was shortening with every day, Fina understood that now. Slowly, she made her way back to the village, the room he had found for them more vivid in her consciousness than anything she saw.

*

She knew when her father called her. She had heard the ringing of the telephone above the clatter of voices in the bar, and her father’s surprise when he responded. ‘Well, b’the holy farmer! How are you at all?’ She pushed the glass she’d just filled across the counter. ‘Wait’ll I get Fina for you,’ she heard her father say, and when she picked the receiver up John Michael’s voice was there at once.

‘Hullo, Fina.’

He didn’t sound distant, only unusual, because in all the time of their friendship they had never spoken on the telephone to one another.

‘John Michael!’

‘Did you get my letter, Fina? About the room?’

‘I got it yesterday.’

‘Are you OK, Fina?’

‘Oh, I am, I am. Are you, yourself?’ There wouldn’t be telephone calls, he’d said before he went, and she agreed: telephone calls would eat up what he earned. But hearing his voice was worth every penny they’d lose.

‘I’m good, Fina.’

‘It’s great to hear you.’

‘Listen, Fina, there’s a thing we have to think about.’ He paused for a second or two. ‘A difficulty about May, Fina.’

‘Difficulty?’